Sean Cribbs has been crafting web applications as Prime Motif, Inc. since 2007, primarily in Ruby, Erlang, and Javascript. An active open-source author and contributor, Sean has also been lead developer and release manager of the Ruby-based content management system, Radiant, since 2008. Sean can often be found attending or speaking at user groups near Raleigh-Durham, NC.

Most developers will be familiar with lex, flex, yacc, bison, ANTLR, and other related tools to generate parsers for use inside their own code. Erlang has its own pair, leex and yecc, for accomplishing most complicated text-processing tasks. For computer-friendly languages, however, context-free grammars and their parser-generators leave a few things to be desired. This talk is about how the seemingly simple prospect of parsing some text turned into a new parser toolkit for Erlang called Neotoma, and why functional programming makes parsing fun and awesome.